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debilitating. My musophobia has gone from a ten to maybe an eight-point-five. I can function now, when I hear them. But itâs difficult, almost impossible, for me to relax. Because as soon as I hear a noise, any noise not immediately identifiable, even if it isnât mouse-generated, even if itâs the heater and I know itâs the heater, I start, every fiber of my body standing at attention. And should the source of the noise be confirmed as rodentine, heaven forbid, this triggers the burglar alarm in my soul. Adrenaline surges through me, the fight-or-flight enzyme or whatever it is, and, although Iâm vaguely hard of hearing most of the timeâto the degree that Stacy gets annoyed with me almost every day because I canât hear her from down the hall when she asks me to take out the garbage, check on Maude, feed the catâIâm suddenly a sophisticated sonar device. The navy could install me on a submarine. And I lie there, on Def-Con One, unable to stop myself, and I listen. And when youâre on guard like that, good luck sleeping.
Yes, I know. Mice are harmless. Mice are cute. Mice are mammals, like us. They care for their young and blah blah blah. This is presumably why childrenâs literature is populated byâwe might even say infested with âso many mice. Mickey, Minnie, Mighty, Maisy, Jerry, Wemberly Worried, Stuart Little. Hickory, dickory, dock, the mouse ran up the clock. Goodnight little house, and goodnight mouse. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Leaving crumbs much too small for the other Whosâ mouses. Would you eat them in a house? Would you eat them with a mouse? No fucking way, Seussâand what kind of doctor are you, tormenting me like that?
One time Stacy and I were driving up near Woodstockâthis was before we moved upstateâand we came around a bend to find a deer on the highway. I was behind the wheel, doing sixty-five at least, and the deer was directly in our path. Cucumber-cool, John Wayne in a showdown, I looked that deer straight in the eye and said Donât you move now , and I swerved around him, and we were all fine. Me, Stacy, the deer. All safe. But Stacy was in the passenger seat screaming. Two hours later, she was still freaked about the near miss. My pulse didnât even quicken. I donât know why or how, but I knew I wasnât going to hit the deer. I wasnât afraid at all, not even a little bit, and I probably should have been. My theory is that people who have extreme phobias, like me, they take all the excess fear they repress from instances when they should be scared, and they transfer all of it onto the object of the fear. So I wasnât scared about almost dying in a car crash, just like I wasnât scared on the streets of lower Manhattan on 9/11, or on the plane to Paris when lightning struck the wing and even the flight attendant puked. All of the residual fear that a normal person would experience at those perfectly appropriate moments, all of that, for me, is thrust on the miniscule shoulders of the Mus musculusâ the tiny, harmless rodent who wants nothing more than a few crumbs of bread and a warm place to make a nest for its young. The brown mouse, my green Kryptonite.
Mice brought Stacy and me together. Sort of.
After years of secondary-citizen status in Hoboken, I was finally living in Manhattan, in my own shithole studio on Twenty-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue, right above two bodegas. (If I got home late enough, I could see the end-of-shift hookers buying bagels at the corner deliâTwenty-eighth and Lex was, unbeknownst to me, a prime spot for streetwalking.) My apartment, as it turned out, was a fucking mouse BQE, a West Side Highway of little furry critters. I didnât know this consciously, not at first, but I knew . Mice scurried about my subconscious, squeaked into my dreams. My dormant musophobia, which Iâd acquired as a child, went into overdrive. But I
Yes, I know. Mice are harmless. Mice are cute. Mice are mammals, like us. They care for their young and blah blah blah. This is presumably why childrenâs literature is populated byâwe might even say infested with âso many mice. Mickey, Minnie, Mighty, Maisy, Jerry, Wemberly Worried, Stuart Little. Hickory, dickory, dock, the mouse ran up the clock. Goodnight little house, and goodnight mouse. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Leaving crumbs much too small for the other Whosâ mouses. Would you eat them in a house? Would you eat them with a mouse? No fucking way, Seussâand what kind of doctor are you, tormenting me like that?
One time Stacy and I were driving up near Woodstockâthis was before we moved upstateâand we came around a bend to find a deer on the highway. I was behind the wheel, doing sixty-five at least, and the deer was directly in our path. Cucumber-cool, John Wayne in a showdown, I looked that deer straight in the eye and said Donât you move now , and I swerved around him, and we were all fine. Me, Stacy, the deer. All safe. But Stacy was in the passenger seat screaming. Two hours later, she was still freaked about the near miss. My pulse didnât even quicken. I donât know why or how, but I knew I wasnât going to hit the deer. I wasnât afraid at all, not even a little bit, and I probably should have been. My theory is that people who have extreme phobias, like me, they take all the excess fear they repress from instances when they should be scared, and they transfer all of it onto the object of the fear. So I wasnât scared about almost dying in a car crash, just like I wasnât scared on the streets of lower Manhattan on 9/11, or on the plane to Paris when lightning struck the wing and even the flight attendant puked. All of the residual fear that a normal person would experience at those perfectly appropriate moments, all of that, for me, is thrust on the miniscule shoulders of the Mus musculusâ the tiny, harmless rodent who wants nothing more than a few crumbs of bread and a warm place to make a nest for its young. The brown mouse, my green Kryptonite.
Mice brought Stacy and me together. Sort of.
After years of secondary-citizen status in Hoboken, I was finally living in Manhattan, in my own shithole studio on Twenty-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue, right above two bodegas. (If I got home late enough, I could see the end-of-shift hookers buying bagels at the corner deliâTwenty-eighth and Lex was, unbeknownst to me, a prime spot for streetwalking.) My apartment, as it turned out, was a fucking mouse BQE, a West Side Highway of little furry critters. I didnât know this consciously, not at first, but I knew . Mice scurried about my subconscious, squeaked into my dreams. My dormant musophobia, which Iâd acquired as a child, went into overdrive. But I
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